Angstrom on Xilinx ML507

* Important this is an experimental and ongoing project

After several kernel panics and machine exceptions I’m now been able to boot Linux on Xilinx Ml507 development platform; This board combines a Powerpc 440 cpu with standard peripherals like ethernet, serial ports, DVI, sata, etc. plus a large re configurable area where custom hardware can be developed and interconnected to the main CPU via the processor bus.

Xilinx provides a development environment but the Linux board support is pretty old since most vendors don’t support this board any more. Since there was previous work on Openembedded supporting previous version of this platform (Powerpc 405 based) adding support for Ml507 board is simple.

Most of the problems that arise in my initial efforts was setting the correct Kernel options, erroneous hardware configurations, missing dev nodes in final root file system. Christopher ‘Embedded Linux premier’ book prove to be a great reference also many of the xilinx application notes that I have to check to learn about the gotchas.

At my github repo there’s the result hardware project http://github.com/aalonso/xilinx-ml507 there’s two branches the master branch holds the reference design as described in the application note [1] the second branch adds the device tree infrastructure to generate the hardware descriptor file (*.dts) that the Kernel uses to find out about the resources available in the target system.

I push some patches to Openembedded developers list to add the corresponding support, this was important in order to simplify the process of replicating my developing environment for new team members in the lab at my faculty. Some of the problems that I still have is that ethernet device is not working, I have read some applications notes that mention that the driver provided in the Linux kernel only works in certain configuration mode; Alternative I can use the soft-ethernet hardware module since is reported that works.

Soon I will post a quick howto with the steps to boot Linux, for the moment

On the next week I’m going to give a crash course using Openembedded at my faculty, and also seriously thinking that my current project is a good candidate for participating in Google summer of code which is right at the corner.

[1] Using U-Boot with the Xilinx ML507 Evaluation Platform

Target platform

Linux is highly supported on different architectures like ARM, MIPS, x86, m68k. When some refers to a target platform is combination of an architecture (CPU) and a board that holds that CPU. Selecting the right platform depends on the application requirements or your actual needs.

If you are in the case as me (learning purposes) you can choose any know handled device that supports Linux like N800 Nokia tablet PC, Ipod player or if you can’t afford any of this gadgets you can use Qemu for target virtualization.

My choice is Qemu targeting an ARM achitecture.